There is a possibility that Austin Romaine will be a fine professional football player, make boatloads of money more than whatever he is taking in as a linebacker at Texas Tech, and maybe get drafted by an NFL team that isn't awful. Maybe he'll be known as more than just The Guy Named After A Lettuce.
But even if bad luck in the athlete business besets him and none of these things happen, he's still got Saturday, and if that isn't enough to get him free drinks in Lubbock for a decade, then shame on Lubbock for yet another thing.
Romaine intercepted a pass from Sam Houston State University quarterback Brett Holloway and returned it 15 yards for a touchdown in the Red Raiders' 760-7 (okay, 49-14) win over SHSU on Saturday. Which of course is no big deal. Pick-sixes happen all the time. Most Texas citizens could do it in street clothes, or tell you they could.
But seven seconds later, he did it again, on the very next play, this time for 31 yards and against a different quarterback, original starter Landyn Locke. A pick-12, if you insist. He took a momentarily close game between a have and a have-not in the new college football landscape and transformed it from an alums-checking-contract-buyout-language game into a comforting rout in the time it takes you to come out of the restroom without washing your hands and ask, "What'd I miss?"
Remarkably, this was not the first time such a thing has happened. Duke's DeVon Edwards did it against North Carolina State in 2013, and apparently also returned a kickoff 100 yards for a third score. We say "apparently" because some sites list the returner as Niklas Sade, and frankly, that's Duke's problem, not yours. The point is, Edwards did the other stuff, so as odd as Romaine's feat seems, it is not unprecedented. It is undeniably cool, though.
How this impacts the rest of his life is, of course, to be determined. Football is a series of events defined by bad luck, worse injuries, and, every once in a while, more money than a person can reasonably eat. Romaine could be any of the three, and maybe all of them. Based on a series of NFL draft sites (we stopped at nine because the gods did not mean for anyone to spend that much time on that squalid corner of the internet grease trap), he is listed on the linebacker list anywhere from seventh (Big Board Scouting) to 31st (NFL Draft Buzz), and one site (Walter Football) has him unranked, though its veracity can be questioned since it has LSU inside linebacker Whit Weeks listed sixth and eighth, and we're betting he's not good enough to be both.
But one of the sites (if you care which one, go take a walk in the sunshine and think kind thoughts about the disturbed shut-in who does this stuff for a living) also described Romaine with these words: "a downhill thumper." That might be even cooler than his work Saturday, because if nothing else he can scare his grandchildren forty years from now when they're acting up by loudly growling, "You don't want the Downhill Thumper to come upstairs and straighten you out, do you?"
There is, after all, no power as satisfyingly grandiose as posing the threat of no-Christmas-for-you from the relative most likely to buy you a ridiculously expensive and potentially dangerous gift. Austin Romaine, you have kicked life square in the arse and driven it face-first into the rosebushes. Well done, you.
